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The International Underground Rap & Hip Hop connexion has the immense pleasure to greet into its writers team the French Philosopher Benjamine Weill.

With a solid background into Contemporary philosophy at the University of the Sorbonne (Paris) she grew up with Hip Hop and is currently writing a book about it, that will be released within the year!

Benjamine is already writing also some articles about the movement and the culture with always some kind of a philosophical approach and a larger vision… You will find below the first part of “Philosophical perspective about Hip Hop by Benjamine Weill”.

We will be publishing this part of her work for the movement as a series offered to our readers little by little and also some of her other articles within the year.

We will also keep you up to date with her upcoming book and we really do hope that you will be as interested as we are by her peculiar approach of both, Hip Hop and Philosophy.

Article written by Benjamine Weill and translated from French to English by Isa Nahila S-Bigini

First below you will find her text in French and then its translation into English.

Before anything else I have to explain to you my approach. I do it first of all for myself, because well organized charity begins with oneself. Also I really feel that I have got the intuition of this approach that accompagns me since so long, but not completely its reasoning.

As my dear Director says so often “Intuition is intelligence making a leap”, and as he encouraged me to write, to come back to this tedious and sublime excercice, I could not not mention him within the fist moments of this writing… Anyway said this way, this might not talk to you so better to explain. If intuition is intelligence making a leap this is because intuition often aims straight, but does not know the reasons that led it to the conclusion it is seizing.

In other words, it is the reasoning that underlies the conclusion that is “skipped”. As far as am concerned this is over 20 years that I got the intuition that there is something to defend, to promote on a much more intellectual level than it has ever been done within the Hip Hop. But this is also that I got the intuition since I met rap and philosophy that there is a link to be made… Even further, today I would almost say that Hip Hop intuitively developps some philosophycal and exsistencial elements that would need to be rebuilt rationally by myself. Ambitious if it is, I am starting this project without knowing too much by which end or which means to take it, but rap as philosophy both grabbed me one by one and simultenously, it is time to reverse the roles and to see how this love story between us three (myself, rap and philosophy) was borned, and what it does put into perspectives.

This is one of the reasons why since I had discovered both, one and another, I never stopped trying to make a link in order to first give a coherence to my own life. It is first about a selfish need to give a meaning to my own swervings or contradictions that maybe are not some.

I own all to this music, my life and my survival. I first felt it in my guts before I thought it. I own her as much as I own to philosophy. One and the other stood front of me in hard times and gave me the strength to keep going, the ability to understand and feel, when I thought that all inside of me was dead.

Rap woke me up to my own body when philosophy was opening my ability to think. And I constantly made links in order to give a coherence to my life. It therefore is first a need of giving a meaning to my own swerving or contradictions. In another words, one and the other enabled me to make the junction, link, gateway between these two entities so often separated within the Occidental classic culture: the mind and the body. I cannot however resign myself to this opposition and I note that the philosophy of the body is way more teaching for the thought than pure idealism (you know the one whom induced by Plato and his famous world of the ideas, only real world, and worthy of interest!). In the same way, those who see in the rap a single instinctual expression of young dogs are totally wrong.

Rap talks about life, existence, its difficulties and of the questionings that life from this earth brings us. I already feel emerging the will to tell you that there is a philosophical dimension into rap and that there is something Hip Hop into philosophy, but this would be a short cut for now, that is too early… We will see if we will disassemble it.

Accordingly to the fact that one and the other are composed of various branches, of styles peculiar to those who make them, and of sociological and cultural elements.. Nevertheless, one and another (and this is maybe their meeting point, their keystone) in their diversity and their subjectivity aspire to a quasi universal dimension. All the philosophers claim doing THE real philosophy, touching with the finger something real, subscribing to a global movement that touches the entire humanity.

In the same way, each rapper claims his style as being the only one and unique, and as the philosophers clash one another. In philosophy as in Hip Hop, the battle were always normal…

At last, one and the other inspire themselves from the past history to stimulate, develop and re-start from a base already inscribed in what has already been said, or previously rapped about. So, Hip Hop crews have their equivalences within schools of thoughts – cuts and punchlines match the different stages of the logical lines of reasoning, and some trends arise without never being able to meet each others so much there are in opposition with one another.

This is not an evidence when you are listening to the discourses held about one or the other and I feel well that some might be smiling reading me, so much what am telling can seem ridiculous.